Feb. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Bad girls tend to get the best music
in opera. Two-timing Manon has an unforgettable gavotte, and
sex-for-hire Violetta celebrates free love with a great
cabaletta. Now they have an unlikely sister.

The surgically enhanced, pill-popping Anna Nicole Smith,
who died in 2007, has just joined their ranks in a world
premiere at London’s Royal Opera House last night.

“Anna Nicole,’’ by composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and
librettist Richard Thomas, should come with a warning for
voyeurs. The rumors of explicit acts are false. The one moment
of congress is carefully hidden. It’s true that there are some
exaggeratedly false breasts, if that floats your boat.

What the opera really offers is a clever comic parable
about the tragedy of commodifying human flesh.

The early scenes use broad-brush strokes to present a jokey
portrait of Anna Nicole’s trailer-trash upbringing. When she
joins a lap-dancing club as the only means to escape her
minimum-wage life, her initial naivety and good-natured
awkwardness are amusing too. Whatever Anna Nicole may have been
like in real life, in the opera she’s an innocent abroad, a
sympathetic simpleton struggling to support her son.

Then comes the operatic knife twist, the Faustian bargain
which gives the work its pathos. To succeed as a dancer, she is
told to get larger breasts. Seems like the beginning of a joke,
doesn’t it? Not so. The extra weight skews her back, leaving her
hooked to painkillers and other drugs for the rest of her life.

Pain, Shame

“Ease the pain, block the shame,’’ she sings while popping
pills. She smiles to the cameras on the day she marries an
elderly billionaire while wearing a comically huge wedding
dress. The same cocktail of uppers and downers later kills her
gentle son Daniel. It’s a bleak, heartrending end to a piece
which sloughs off more and more of its comedy as it proceeds.

Turnage’s score seamlessly mixes jazz, blues and music-theater idioms, and underpins them all with percussion-rich
orchestration.

Anna gets a beautifully lyrical number (“You need a little
luck, girls’’), full of false hopes, after her breast job. Her
mother has a vitriolic, expletive-rich tirade against men which,
ironically, is set to a seductive waltz. The writing for chorus
is expertly done too.

Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek sings with soaring power
and superb diction as Anna. She’s energetic, naive, and hopeful,
and her strained smile in the face of despair is touching.
There’s great support from Gerald Finley as her boyfriend, and
Alan Oke is terrific as her lively octogenarian husband.

Director Richard Jones brings a stylized look to the piece:
It’s a gaudy world of “bigger is better’’ in everything from
furniture to fake breasts. He keeps a firm tonal control over
the blend of laughs and pathos too.

Could it be time for Manon to move over and welcome Anna
into the fold?

Rating: ****.

“Anna Nicole” is in repertory through March 4 at the
Royal Opera House, London.